MaconMacGuy.com:

Putting the tech pieces together
for Macon & Middle Georgia
for "a good while now"

Sometimes technology changes, even when we don’t want it to.

One of my clients is blind, and runs a computer-based recording studio (that is verrrry nice, let me tell you….). There’s a constant dance we have to do to keep his machines running, because not only do you have the inherent complexities of dealing with Windows (XP pro in his case), PLUS the weirdnesses of audio on Windows, you have JAWS, a screenreader fropm Freedom Scientific to boot.

It can get hairy keeping things running.

My client has depended on Outlook Express for years for his email – primarily because Jaws didn’t play well with the full Outlook, and webmail isn’t an option (for the same reason). Summer 2009 Microsoft stopped supporting Outlook Express on Hotmail because they moved to “Windows Live”, which uses a fundamentally different technology for email fetching.

Now, I understand the technical and business reason for Microsoft’s decision – after all, this is a FREE product they’re offering. I also understand my client SHOULD have moved off of using MSN for his primary email a long time ago, and moved it onto his own domain – but generally you don’t fix what’s broken, especially when you have a memorize what is onscreen because you can’t see it!

But this means my client can do NO business online, because email is how he conducts a good part of his studio work.

A tough situation – one he didn’t ask for. In the next installment I’ll describe what we decided on after much discussion – and let you know how it all came out.

As I type this I’m waiting to find out myself!

Yet another client story:
I received a phone call from a client who is unabashedly not comfortable with computers. She was getting some weird errors from Firefox and AVG, but couldn’t really describe what they said.

Fortunately it was on may way, so I was able to swing in quickly just to see what was going on. I confirmed the errors, which were the “generic” type of thing you get when the application has a situation it doesn’t know how to handle.

I tried to do a quick online virus scan, to no avail – the machine was running way too slow. Granted, its a slow machine, underpwoered, needs RAM (which the company has not installed yet), and is running Windows 2000 – but even by IT’S standards it was running slow.

After a few minutes I thought the check teh hard drive. That 18gig drive had – wait for it – 20 kilobytes of free space.

{insert dragnet theme here!}

The computer had no working space on teh hard drive – avg had nowhere to stash the virus definitions update file, and Firefox couldn’t update it’s cache.

I deleted several non-used apps, and cleared out the Windows Temp folder…. a simple fix for a major problem. It isn’t a long-term solution, but will keep them running for a while longer.

• Someone asked me the other day what I did.

• Yesterday I spent a few hours setting up a new online presence for my music activities.

• This morning I glanced at the MaconMacGuy logo.

Three unrelated incidents – yet they combine into a thought about what exactly it is I do as the MaconMacGuy.

Essentially what I do is enhance a client’s online presence through a variety of means. My skillset is fairly broad, and I’m not afraid to call in help where it’s needed – but my real strength is in identifying what technologies make sense for a business to use, and then helping the business implement those things into the workflow.

Case in point – YoungAmericaMusic.com. For several years that site has been a traditional static site (which I designed and have maintained). In the last year I saw a need for YAMS to have something more dynamic – but that would still reflect the “folksy” vibe of the store. Emmett, the owner, also needed to a way to do some updates, and it needed to be baby-simple. He doesn’t have time to integrate a whole new techno-thing to his workflow – he’s got music lessons to teach!

We discussed what he needed – a way to post event announcements to 2 different groups. I setup 2 different blogs on Blogger.com, and took about 20 minutes one day and worked with him. He became comfortable with it quickly, and started adding material to both of them. Meanwhile, I added the two blogs to my Feedburner account – and setup a headline animator. It took just a few minutes to add the code to the front page – and mission accomplished, with VERY little expense to the store.

Now he has a way to add announcements to the groups – they are automatically added to the site, people can get new material automatically sent to their email, and I can track how many people are reading his missives.

As a bonus, this new feature should also increase his search engine visibility because of the search-engine-friendly dynamic content.

This type of thing is what my byline is referring to: Putting the Pieces Together. I leveraged my experience with Wordpress, blogging, SEO (search engine optimization), teaching & training, HTML/PHP, plus a few other odds and ends to make this happen – and he is not only happy with the results, he is already seeing some tangible benefits to the store.

So how can I help you?

The short answer: IMPROVISE!

I just tried to give a final exam in a computer class I teach at Mercer. The final is given online using an online service we use in the class – and have all semester relatively successfully.

The class yesterday took it with a few problems, but nothing major. Today, though, was a different story.

3 of the 20-some student could access the final exam – and a 30 minute conversation with tech support resulted in the response “We don’t know what is causing your problem.” This is tech-speak for “That shouldn’t be happening, and we’d need to do some serious forensics work to figure it out – and that’s not going to happen”.

This started me thinking about what a small business needs to do when thigns blow up. In my case (a college class), I discussed with the class the options – and made a change the syllabus (not count a final exam and adjust the percentages in other areas to make up the difference) – so it wasn’t a busizes-critical thing.

But if it HAD been, what would I have done? Anyone who depends on technology has got to think about that – the biz calls it “disaster-preparedness”, but I’d call it “common sense”. You KNOW your machines are going to die, and they will do it at the WORST possible moment.

Every machine on the planet has the middle name of “Murphy”, and they follow Murphy’s law to the letter.

So make plans for your machines going down. How will YOU improvise when it happens?

A few comments sparked by an article from Small Business Newz titled “Search Guru Laments Small Business Web Practices”.

The article references a blog by Danny Sullivan, who is arguably THE guru when it comes to online search engine optimization techniques. In the original blog posting Danny tells a few stories about his recent move to California – during which he had occasion to try to find a local locksmith and a pizza place. In one case the site had been hijacked and was trying to download viruses onto any visitor’s computer – that will really buoy a business’s reputation! In another case there were in fact TWO website and domains for the business – but neither one was really complete.

The other interesting fact is that Danny tried to help these people out by offering some free advice – but was rebuffed on both accounts…. perhaps “ignored” is a better word.

On the face of it those two business owners were not very interested in making their websites useful. It sounds to me like they had one merely because they “ought to”, but really didn’t understand why.

I’m not one of those people who are convinced a website is the path to overnight riches – it certainly hasn’t happened in my case! – but I AM convinced that a well-designed website serves a valuable place in a business owner’s toolkit.

It can serve as a brochure – in it’s simplest form. But there are several different aspects of that “simple” brochure that you need to include, or it is useless.

It definitely can serve as a point of contact – but too many sites just put a “mailto” link up – which is really annoying if you are on a public computer and DON’T have your personal email program on it. or if you are like me and use webmail 100% of the time).

But, again – there are issues you have to make sure you cover!

It can also serve as a customer tool – a place to swap files with clients without all that tedious mucking about in FTP-space (to mangle a line from a certain Douglas Adams book).

What has been interesting in watching my client’s sites is the traffic they get from a simple site that provides the information people need – and in a way that makes the search engines happy. None of them will every get a gazillion visits a day, true – but a few hundred a week can still generate some serious sales leads.

So take a gander at your site – and contact me to see if I can make it work better.

This should be subtitled (To err is human, to really screw things up takes a computer” – or in this case, a entire network.

One of my clients has a website I was hired to completely redo as a CMS system. I accepted the job at a serious discount (mainly because I live there) and proceeded to create the site using WordPressMU.

Things were going fine until I tried to transfer the domain. At this point the site is completely down – WordPressMU is confused becuase it thinks there’s a URL problem – so the only thing you can get is the signup page. I ahve cleaned out the database of ALL references to the old “temp” URL, which made no difference (yet).

Meanwhile, I’m trying to get the domain transferred over to the new hosting (keeping teh domain adn the hosting with the same vendor makes life a lot simpler – AND in this case it’s cheaper over at MidGaHosting.com compared to GoDaddy).

This is when it gets…ahhh..interesting. no one has any documentation on the original account setup – and Private Domain Locking was enabled originally, but no one has the account number or password.

Still researching, though! Updates when there’s something worth reporting!

Sometimes the hardest thing about working with a technical situation is scoping out the best solution – especially when it isn’t the obvious one.

For example, let’s say you want to setup an online ecommerce store, but your pricing structure does not work with teh shopping cart out of the box. At this point you have 2 choices – customize the store, or find a different way to finagle the pricing into a format the cart can work with.

Customizing the store means you’ll be adding to the upfront development expense, and you very well may be locking yourself out of any upgrades or even security patches. If the customization isn’t handled well, you very well may have a customized cart that can’t be updated, AND where the prices have to be updated one by one.

This is not a good place to be if you have several thousand products in your catalog.

The solution I’m working on involves pulling the new pricing info (received from the master vendor) into an Excel spreadsheet, which then massages the data into something acceptable. We can then export a CSV file, which the cart can read en masse.

It’s quick, simple, and easily changed. It also makes the cart updateable – a win-win situation.

Happy 4th of July! Don’t forget to remember from whence we came (hint: the Founding Fathers talked a lot about God – and not in some wishy-washy vague sort of way)

Projects currently underway:

• Lakewildwood.org redesign
• MowProducts.com – tech help
• ..and of course, this site! Way overdue for a redesign